2024-12-26 00:16:43
This has been a difficult piece to write. Everything has been for the past few months. It was all stuckness and straining, fighting and grinding, no flow and no ease. I can finish this now, I think, because I feel some light. Faith has returned.
Back in October, I spent a weekend solving puzzles and fighting with foam swords in the forest of Connecticut (role-play that was not a LARP but kind of LARP-y). On the second day, we sat in a clearing with a group of elders when one of them asked: “What is your greatest fear?”
That hit me like a train. I felt an electric shiver across the back of my skull, my signal to be still and listen to my intuition. If I could let myself relax, if I could drop the urge to look smart in front of everyone, there would be space for a deeper truth to emerge. I focused on my breath while the question made its way around the circle.
“My greatest fear is that I don’t do what I am here to do,” I heard myself say. Surprise.
I used to think very differently about life.
There seemed to be nothing “to do” in the sense of destiny or purpose. We are born, we do things, we die. We’re here to have children, amuse ourselves, and suffer. Humanity, as Rust Cohle put it, looked like a tragically self-aware species trapped in a “giant gutter in outer space.” The point of life then, I reasoned with my college roommate on a drunk night, must be to experience more pleasure than pain. But those were hollow words stitched together like a tablecloth to cover my deep unease.
Some six years ago, my then-girlfriend accidentally exposed the void underneath the cover. “How would you feel if you died tomorrow?” she asked.
“I think I’d be okay with it,” she said. I understood why. That woman was a badass. She had escaped the bonds of a strict religious community and arranged marriage, moved to another country, and was building two businesses. Her life was neither easy nor perfect, but she was the main character of her story.
I on the other hand felt paralyzed by the question, like a rabbit staring at a snake. I had reached my early thirties, but it felt as if my real life had not even begun. If life was like going to the movies, I was still watching trailers. I was moving from job to job (and, if I’m being honest, from relationship to relationship) looking for an answer to the gravitational pull of inner emptiness.
Søren Kierkegaard called this ‘unconscious despair’, the despair of a self unaware of its spiritual nature. But spirituality meant nothing to me and neither did Kierkegaard. All I knew was that I had no answers and didn’t know what questions to ask. Then I stumbled right into it.
During COVID, I bumped into a muse, the living embodiment of my secret creative yearning (and a future tragicomic love story). In our brief time together, she opened a tiny crack in the door to the other realm. And once you know there even is a door, it’s hard not to keep going.
In the last few years, I went deeper — with psychedelics, meditation, sound, breathwork, and other practices. I cried, shook, roared, and floated in blissful silence. The deepest moments were selfless and timeless, yet also deeply alive. I felt centered and in harmony, congruent as if all shapes of me had collapsed into one. I had been worried about being swallowed by the void, but now I fell into it, through it, beyond it. I realized the void was just as much ‘home’ as the rest of my life.
One night, I took off my mask to the sound of distant rain and singing bowls and bumped into something. It took me a while to realize that I returned as a believer.
At first, it felt like an intrusion, an embarrassment even. I couldn’t explain what had happened or what I believed. Everything felt beyond the reach of words. But sometimes, especially around trees and water, I could still feel the subtle tapestry connecting me with all things. If God is real, what do they want, I asked a friend.
“Things are more integrated than they seem, they are better than they seem, and they are more mysterious than they seem,” Huston Smith wrote about the shared ideas across religious traditions in The World’s Religions. That matched my experience. The world had become more mysterious, more alive, and more connected.
But as the world took on a gentle holy glow, my life came unglued. Everything felt misaligned and out of place. I fell out of life. The city seemed absurdly noisy, and I became sensitive to people’s moods in ways I had never experienced. I spent even more time alone, pondering and wandering.
Work was bad. Ideas that had interested me died in my hands. The only thing holding my fascination seemed to be the inner journey. I had blown the doors of perception wide open and walked right into a dark night of the soul.
Also, my fear changed shape. Gone was the despair over a meaningless universe. But what if, I wondered, what if I have a fate but fail to meet it? This fear felt a lot more intense. “The more consciousness, the more the despair,” as Kierkegaard put it.
I obsessed over time. Had I discovered the secret of life too late? “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” Shakespeare’s deposed King Richard II laments his fate. I rushed from one experience to the next, desperate for more knowledge and guidance, determined to catch up. I jumped into the void until I destabilized myself enough, I couldn’t tell a bad dream from a vision or ‘visitation.’ I was stumbling through a newly fluid and porous reality.
When I stopped chasing experiences, I was left with a pile of clues but no map, no further guidance, no comforting visions. What if I never found my path South? What if I forgot my precious fragments of truth and fell back asleep? What if I lost myself in the maze of entertaining distractions? The trailers were over, the movie was running — and I still could not figure out what role I was supposed to play?
The many faces of fear converged into one: a fear of failing to act, of remaining still like the rabbit. My greatest fear was falling prey to fear itself.
Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death is a tough read and I am grateful that David Milch guided me to its key idea. The answer to despair, Kierkegaard wrote, was for the self to rest in faith, to “rest transparently in the power that established it.” To rest — not to strain or complain, not to argue, fight, and gripe.
This echoed my deepest experiences, moments of stillness, timelessness, and selflessness. But I found it almost impossible to follow.
Resting in faith means dropping all expectations, all ideas of what life should be like. It’s a goodbye to old desires and designs, a kind of tiny death. I don’t know how things are supposed to unfold. Thy will be done.
I anchor my days with meditation and prayer. I wait for a glimpse of timeless connection and wholeness. I express gratitude and ask for guidance. “I don’t know how things are supposed to unfold.” All I get is this moment and the choice of how I show up.
I try to listen, to be present, to share, to be of service. When I struggle to get it right, as inevitably happens, I hope for another chance to do better.
“Man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time,” C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters, “it all comes to him by pure gift.”
Every day is a chance — the only chance — to receive and share the gift.
Every day offers a chance to experience that “our sense of separateness in every fundamental way is an illusion” as David Milch put it.
Every day presents a choice of acting from a place of fear or faith, of letting the mind create a world of despair or glory.
“The human opportunity, the religions tell us,” Smith wrote, “is to transform our flashes of insight into abiding light.” Once life turns from a meaningless slog into a mysterious (and miraculous) journey of utmost importance, the real work begins.
Destiny is not a place to reach but a path to walk. Destiny is a direction, not a destination.
— Frederik
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Instead of “How would you feel if you died tomorrow?” ask yourself: “What would I do if I had two to five years left?”
Pick a time frame long enough to do something difficult, ambitious, and meaningful, but too short to avoid making a choice. No multi-tasking. What one thing would you focus on?
If you could leave the world with one more meaningful contribution, what would be the scariest thing to attempt?
Related:
2024-12-23 22:46:01
When Leonard Cohen worked on new songs, he “fooled around” with his guitar until he felt like crying. Once he felt a “little catch” in his throat, he knew he had “made contact” with something deeper.
Until a few years ago, this would have sounded completely alien to me. Make yourself cry? Like, on purpose? As a guy? I’m sorry, what?
I used to hate it when a movie, song, or moment caught my heart. I preferred pushing emotions away to expressing them (let alone talking about them). Tears felt particularly icky. They seemed weak and embarrassing. There’s a German term for getting teary-eyed quickly: nahe am Wasser gebaut — to be built close to water. I did not want the house of my life anywhere near the volatile waters of emotion, no thank you. My house would stand on solid and dry rock.
My nightmare was to feel overwhelmed and lose control in public. Think of Roman Roy breaking down next to his father’s coffin during Succession’s funeral.
It’s a powerful scene because it captures our ambivalence. Roman shows us his heart. His reward? He is mocked. It is a career-ending moment. If tears have consequences, is it not rational to fear them?
Today, I feel very differently about tears, at least in private. In fact, I see them as a litmus test. Does what, or who, I face have the potential to move me to tears? And can I let myself be moved, or do I shy away from the intensity of the experience?
This change dates back to the years after my divorce. I realized that, well, it actually was a big deal, that I was spiraling into depression, and that I needed help. My default answer was to look for talk therapy.
For about a year, I left work once a week to sit in a bland office and stare at tired carpet flooring. Every week, I told a story. Something about my boss, my parents, dates, friends, money, whatever occupied my mind. Then I held my breath and waited for the dreaded question. “How does that make you feel?”
That drove me nuts. I was not feeling anything. If anything, my body felt kind of empty? Every week I went through the same excruciating and expensive experience. I wanted to be fixed without having to feel things. My therapist refused. When I returned to my thoughts, he gently prodded me back to my body.
Eventually, I did notice short and subtle flickers of feelings. They seemed to disappear as quickly as I caught them. Then I bumped into something new, something I had avoided for a long time: anger. Anger at my annoying therapist for starters. Turns out there was a lot more where that came from.
Today, my heart can catch quickly. My deepest experiences lead me to tears with remarkable consistency.
I journal to unlock emotions. Often I get angry first. Sometimes the page suffers. In rare cases, a pen breaks. But eventually, I cross the chasm to my heart.
Intense breathwork? I roar, weep, and laugh. Two hours of 5 Rhythms dance? I sweat, shake, and sob. Psychedelics? Tears and smiles, smiles and tears. Kambo frog poison? People around me purge and puke. I nearly pass out, then I wail. A beautiful church choir? Music? Great movie? Heck, even being dragged to Frozen the Musical can be enough…
This week, I traveled to Germany for my grandmother’s funeral. When Grandma was on her deathbed, and I was still in New York, I felt a flash of her presence during meditation. I knew it was time. And yet I felt nothing at first. When my father called, I was calm and collected. But I could tell that I was holding back. Over the following days, I created space to let the grief spill out.
It was different when my mother’s parents passed away. I was stoic and controlled from start to finish. I would be no Roman Roy. As a result, grief showed up many years later during moments of doing inner work. I think of it like an underground reservoir or a cavern filled with containers, an emotional debt accumulating since childhood. But I no longer want to be a carrier of ancient dark, cold water.
“As with Freud’s patients, I found that my patients’ physical symptoms were the direct result of strong feelings repressed in the unconscious,” Dr. John Sarno wrote about the connection between chronic ailments and emotions. For me, it wasn’t back pain but clenched jaws, depression, an inability to feel when I wanted to, avoidance of intimacy, stomach tension, and an unhealthy relationship with pornography.
Today, I try to catch myself when I get tense, distracted, or irritated. I pay attention when I slip into dissociation. I try to find out what is “working” inside me and release it. I know I feel more alive and conscious afterward.
The most dramatic change — this may sound completely trivial — has been that tears feel normal rather than dangerous. I am not worried about being overwhelmed or that a situation is “too much.” Letting things flow through my body reduces the pressure and teaches me about the experience itself. Whatever comes up, I can be more confident I won’t drown. I float.
Still, judgment can come up. A part of me felt disgusted when I began to write this post. What are you going on about? What do you experience that is so terrible? This is life! Toughen up. Be a man!
I am learning to reframe this and meet it with love.
First, noticing that life could be worse creates an opportunity to be grateful.
Second, if others have it worse, that is an opportunity to send love and be of service — to others and to myself.
Third, the more I witness feelings arise and disappear, the more I recognize them as “a happening” as Alan Watts would have said. They don’t need to meet a benchmark to be valid; neither should they be mindlessly followed or elevated.
Finally, we don’t know all that lurks in our shadows. The source of some anger and sadness may be impossible to understand — or not even be ours (remember the psychosphere).
“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience,” as Frank Herbert put it in Dune. I am learning to move with the inner process, to let it unfold, and to leave it behind.
If I allow myself the grief, I get to experience the full memory of my grandmother’s loving presence. If I allow myself to listen to my heart, I also get to hear her voice. The reward for tears of grief, I’ve found, are tears of joy and gratitude.
— Frederik
In memory of Margarete Gieschen, 1933 — 2024.
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One of the simplest tools I’ve found is “Journalspeak” by Dr. Sarno and his student Nicole Sachs.
Write your way through: through grief and sadness, loneliness and failure, judgment and self-loathing. Write until you feel your heart catch. Keep writing until you notice your mechanisms of avoidance. Then keep going and pour it all out. Don’t write to dwell on it but to let it go. Write for yourself, to acknowledge what is, to admit the difficult truths of life — and to leave them on the page.
Nicole explains the method in the first episodes of her podcast and YouTube channel. It’s very simple.
I recommend you pick a new journal. Use a pen that allows you to write quickly.
Make a list of stressors (Sarno: “List all the pressures in your life, since they all contribute to your inner rage.”). Nicole recommends three lists: past stressors, current stressors, and personality tests.
Every day pick one and write for at least 20 minutes (especially in the beginning it can take time to transition from thinking to flow).
Sarno: “Write an essay, the longer the better, about each item on your list. This will force you to focus in depth on the emotional things of importance in your life.”
Sachs: “Tell the radical truth and don’t be afraid to go deep. Invite your feelings to rise. They won’t always do so right away, and that’s okay! True readiness is everything. Just stay the course and you will be surprised what comes out. The key is to stay focused on your emotional response.”
Sachs recommends “a self-soothing meditation for 10 minutes” afterward. I definitely need a break after an intense session. I swear by this Yoga Nidra channel (lie down, cover your eyes, listen, float…).
Challenge yourself to do this daily for 28 days.
2024-12-20 02:44:12
I have been reading Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich’s book about the fall of the Soviet Union. A self-described “human ear,” she approached history by assembling anecdotes and interviews. “When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations,” she said, “I always think — how many novels disappear without a trace.”
It is a book about dealing with change and suffering, about war, the gulag, and an unexpected revolution. But a level below that I found people wrestling with the rapid and profound change brought about by money. Practically overnight, the formerly communist citizens had to make sense of it. “We had to relearn how to live from scratch,” one woman explained. “Before, I had hated money, I didn’t know what it was. My family never talked about it—it was considered shameful. We grew up in a country where money essentially did not exist.”
Money transformed lives, altered values, and turned hierarchies upside down. One communist party secretary recalled meeting her former driver who she barely recognized in his “buzz cut, leather jacket, and tracksuit.” The man had joined the new elite of entrepreneurs, hustlers, and gangsters. While the party was going out of business, he was making a fortune with jeans.
“He bragged about making more money in one day than the first secretary of the district Party committee made in a month,” the woman recalled. “These jeans-mongers will be the ones running our government,” she realized in horror. “They’ll build their factories up from the basements.” And that, she reminisced years later, was exactly what happened.
Yuval Harari called money the “most successful story ever” and “the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.” For Soviet citizens, it was a new story. “The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb,” one of them explained.
“Not everybody believes in God, not everybody believes in human rights, not everybody believes in nationalism, but everybody believes in money.” — Yuval Harari
There are many ways of looking at money: its function, its qualities, who owns it, where it flows, who controls its supply, and who sets its price. Elon Musk views money as information, a “database for resource allocation across time and space.” Brett Scott framed it as a network, a nervous system. A story, a promise, a system of trust, a way to transact, a network, a representation of our productive and creative capacity — money is all of these analogies and many more.
We take money for granted. It is a base layer of our world, like electricity. Similarly to electricity, we notice its absence immediately. During a power outage, steaks melt in the freezer. Without money, the affluent society’s goods are painfully out of reach. But unlike the power grid, money is inherently social and our relationship with it is emotional.
I find money to be one of the ‘stickiest’ substances I can think of. Being trained as an investor did not make me “good” with money. My relationship with it remained ambivalent and anchored in my past. I discovered that my knowledge about it was overshadowed by my unconscious attitude toward it. And where did that come from? I began to investigate my family’s contradictory attitudes to money.
2024-12-13 00:42:53
Long before he was a famous actor (weighed down by his money), Al Pacino was just another poor New York City kid trying to make rent. One summer, he spent all day on the Subway to get to Rockaway Beach in Queens and borrow $5 from friends for rent. At least he didn’t have to make the trip alone.
“I would read Balzac, Baudelaire, and Flaubert,” Pacino wrote in his memoir, “from pocket-size books with the tiniest type you’ve ever seen.” Before his career took off, he spent his free time at the library and coffee shops with his “little books of the great authors.”
There was something so absorbing about that gift of reading. It could calm your mind and give you another world to be engaged in. Television was too distant; books were more intimate, like having friends and enjoying their company. I would be reading A Moveable Feast and thinking, I don’t want to finish the pages, I like it here too much.
It reminded me of Stephen King’s On Writing in which he called books “uniquely portable magic” that offers the reader an “escape hatch” from reality. But is the same not true for the writer? When King sits down at his computer, that’s his escape.
Gertrude Stein once wrote that masterpieces “tell about time and identity” but must be created while time and identity cease to exist. In other words, the creator must lose themselves to the work. It’s like a portal opens that allows both reader and writer to experience a moment of freedom from themselves.
Even though I’ve struggled to publish recently, I write a lot. Not just for the Substack but by hand for myself. I write in journals and notebooks, at home, at coffee shops, at the library, at airports, you name it. I’ve accepted writing as my default response to life, my way of processing and translating my experiences. “I have to write. Because if I don’t write something and keep on being obsessed by it,” Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges said. “I have to write it and be rid of it.” That’s what it feels like. A compulsion, almost.
I often wonder if it is not self-indulgent navel-gazing. And yet I believe we all should write.
Writing sharpens your thinking. The page exposes the edges of your knowledge and sheds light on your biases. In your sentences, you stumble over the gaps in your understanding. Writing is re-writing, William Zinsser pointed out in the classic On Writing Well. Re-writing is a chance to re-think. And what you can’t see, your readers will helpfully point out.
Writing is also about feeling. Before translating an experience into words, we must allow ourselves to experience it fully. In the excellent Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg called the writer the “carrier of details that make up history.” We must be present and sensitive to our lives “at once ordinary and mythical.” Writing means, Goldberg wrote, “to say a real yes to the real truth of who we are.” This can also help us be more curious and compassionate about others: a good character sketch, I learned from David Milch, is an exercise in capturing contradictions.
The experience of writing strikes me as a form of alchemy. It is a chance to change our story by accepting our history, then leaving it on the page.
“Your hand is pouring out the record of your senses,” Goldberg explains and tells aspiring writers to keep their pens moving no matter what. Write until you learn what lies beyond the thinking mind. Write until the ink leads you from mind to heart.
I have fallen in love with these stream-of-consciousness handwriting exercises. Dr. John Sarno made his patients write to release emotional pain which he thought was manifesting as physical ailments (like back pain). It’s a simple technique that reliably leads me to the tears of buried feelings (one of his disciples has a podcast that explains the method in the first few episodes). Another technique I use is David Milch’s inner dialogue.
Writing helps me move through the maze. Sometimes the page offers sanctuary from the storm. On other days, it is the dragon’s cave waiting in my deepest inner caverns, beckoning with a trail of bleached bones. The pen is like a torch that lets me move forward in the dark. The page also keeps me awake when I am terrified of slipping back into numbness. It exposes comforting lies that could lull me back to sleep. The page may not have an answer, but it knows where the bodies are buried.
“A writer is deeply conflicted,” Leonard Cohen said, “and it’s in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. It doesn’t set the world in order. It doesn’t really change anything. It just is a kind of harbor.”
The search for true words is a way of exploring your inner palace and finding its secret wings. It is a chance to meet yourself and let your shadow speak. At its best — raw, unpredictable, vulnerable — it feels like a confession. It connects the three selves and lets them speak into the silence. This, I’ve realized recently, makes it a form of prayer.
If nothing else, writing is movement and a sign of life. If the pen moves, I move. I am still here, still kicking and breathing. Writing is a way of moving through life — or letting life move through me.
Write for yourself. Write something selfish, but write it honestly, as honestly as you can bear. Write until the page is drenched with the truths you avoid. Write something so selfish it takes you beyond yourself.
Write not because you know the answers, but because you can’t bear the weight of the questions in silence. Write until your heart lightens.
Write not because you’ve seen the light, but to light a candle until dawn.
Write about what is left unsettled when everything has been sorted out.
Write words that weigh you down. Write when you crawl off the battlefield in defeat, covered in mud and blood.
Write words that lift you by the spine. Write in triumph, when you roar with the force of a thousand horses.
Write because the words of the dead came alive inside you. Write because someone once dropped a pebble in the pond of time and you were touched by the ripples.
Write to send out your spirit. Write until you feel the heartbeat of a lonely person on a distant subway. Write them a crooked text, a ramshackle dwelling, an imperfect shelter.
Don’t write to understand, write to take a stand. Then let yourself fall.
Write out of defiance. Write to show you care. Write to show your core.
Write because there must be hope. Write for a future of reading, breathing human beings coming to terms with what it means to live and die.
Write yourself a bridge to the future. Cross it, burn it, forget it.
Write like you’re the last witness.
Write to become immortal, then let yourself be forgotten.
Don’t write to earn a living but because you’ve tasted life. Write to feel alive, as a way of life. Write to live.
Why write? Why do anything. To fill the world with more of what we love. Write as an act of faith, to create the world you want.
Write because you’re still here. Write because you can. Write like the world depends on it. Maybe it does.
I write because I believe it has the power to transform. I write because I believe. I write because I love it and because it lets me love, or at least accept, what may otherwise feel unlovable.
— Frederik
I’m thinking about offering a (monthly?) Zoom session to get together to write and share/discuss.
Previous reflections on writing:
Things I’ve recently enjoyed about writing:
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (How to become a good writer? “Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot.”)
“Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.” ― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
2024-11-26 02:35:12
Stanley Druckenmiller, 71 years old, still starts his day at 4 am. “I immediately go to the Bloomberg,” he said on a recent podcast. “I make a cup of coffee … check all the markets... I take a shower, go to work, start all over again.”
Druckenmiller is worth an estimated $7 billion. Clearly, he no longer plays for money. The market is his passion, his sport. He thinks being “overly competitive” is the hallmark of great money managers. His advice to youngsters? Only enter the game if you love it. “If they're going in it for the money, they should go elsewhere,” he said. “There's too many people in the business like me that just love the game.”
But he also called his competitive streak “a sickness, a disease.” His mentor George Soros once compared his fund to a parasite sucking his blood and draining his energy. Was the fund a vehicle of his success, he wondered, or had he become the fund’s slave?
What is the point of passionately outworking everyone if you end up hating what you once loved? Some investors refuse to retire, but others seem to get consumed by the game. Legends like Soros, Peter Lynch, and Julian Robertson burned out. Even Druckenmiller nearly quit after blowing up during the dot-com bubble. Only a half-year sabbatical gave him the perspective for a comeback trade. What is the price of this passion?
I was reminded of an anecdote that had long confused me. In 2022, the Washington Post profiled retired hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman. The self-made billionaire was worried about the backlash against capitalism and the rich. This article was his soapbox. “I could buy a Picasso for a hundred million,” he told a group of college students, “but it doesn’t turn me on, so then what?”
His answer was philanthropy. “It’s been my pledge, and my wife’s pledge, to give it all away,” he said. “Other than my family, writing checks is the most meaningful thing I do,” he wrote in his memoir From The Bronx To Wall Street. “We live a very rational lifestyle. What better use is there for our money?”
Fair enough. But I was baffled by some of his “very rational” lifestyle choices. First, he moved to Florida to lower his tax rate. Then the “retired” money manager spent his days “anchored to the chair in his office, monitoring the market and calling in to his trading desk again and again.” Not only was he working, but he seemed miserable.
“Does it make any sense?” he asked himself, watching the numbers change on his screen. “To sit inside all day in front of a machine, making money I don’t need so I can give it to someone I don’t know?” — The moral calculations of a billionaire
Well, does it? Does this man look happy?
But who am I to judge? I may sit at my desk with the same where the fuck did it all go wrong? kind of face.
2024-11-10 06:52:54
I’ve been having some wonderful reader conversations recently. One question that comes up reliably is the direction of my work which I would charitably describe as “all over the place.” It reflects my wrestling with how my life has changed, as well as the push and pull between different inner voices, a back and forth between the comfort of the known and fear of the novel.
One reader reminded me of the time when Louis C.K. shared his story at the funeral of his hero, George Carlin. C.K. talked about the darkest point of his career. I had watched it years ago but it’s so honest and raw, that it immediately sent chills down my spine again (I shared the clip on Twitter).
I remembered the technique C.K. used to unlock his creativity. But just like the message of True Detective completely changed when I re-watched it this year, I realized that I had missed the change in C.K.’s mindset which unlocked his career.
C.K. began doing stand-up right out of high school. Even though he initially bombed on stage, he kept going and learned how to write decent jokes. “I wanted it so badly that I kept trying,” he said. But where did persistence lead him? He spent fifteen years perfecting his hour-long routine. Then he realized that he had gone in circles. He hated the act he had crafted so carefully.
Also, he was not successful. “I was working places like Chinese restaurants,” he recalled. “I’d do a show in a Chinese restaurant where they don't even know there's a show gonna happen. They're there to eat.”
“Nobody gave a shit who I was, and I didn't either.”
But fifteen years is a lot of sunk cost. What else was he going to do? “Stopping now is like getting out of prison. What do you do after 15 years of stand-up comedy?” Oof. Needless to say, C.K. was in “a dark place.” But fear kept him going.
Carlin on the other hand released a special every year and “each one was deeper than the next.” C.K. admired it but it also made him despair. “I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that.” How could he do that?
